Within a cultural climate where representations of the medieval are often employed to serve racist and white supremacist ends, the topic of medievalism becomes increasingly relevant. In this episode, Bryant White (Vanderbilt University) discusses his work on the use and abuse of medievalism in Francophone literary contexts. Bryant looks at callbacks to the premodern notion of the “monstrous races”, with a focus on the cynocephali, or dog-headed people, describing how this trope of medieval travel literature finds it way into a trilogy of travel narratives written in French from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While drawn from diverse genres (a novel, an autobiographical account, and a comic book), these texts share a common aim in deploying the trope: to dehumanize the colonial other. On a more positive note, Bryant also examines the use of parodic medievalism in the work of Patrick Chamoiseau, a twenty-first century writer from Martinique. Through parody, Chamoiseau exposes the absurdities inherent in the imposition and dominance of white, European culture within a postcolonial context, critiquing that hegemony while also opening up the possibility for play with concepts such as courtly love and the chivalric quest—concepts elevated to an almost sacred status by earlier forms of medievalism.
Bryant White is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. His dissertation research looks at medieval comic literature, with an emphasis on satire and parody. His narrower focus is on the development of religious parody in vernacular throughout the Middle Ages, looking especially at its proliferation in several genres of late medieval secular drama in France. In a dissertation entitled “Dictes amen devottement: Late Medieval Religious Parody in Context,” he examines how this plays into the larger social and religious circumstances of the Late Middle Ages. Bryant is also involved in digital humanities, particularly work with AI Transformers and Machine Learning. Some of his other research interests include language pedagogy, literary theory, postcolonial studies, philosophy, and film. To follow Bryant’s work: https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/BryantWhite
Dr. Vanessa Iacocca is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. She is hard at work on her first book, Ossianic Medievalisms: Dialogic Nation-Building and a Tradition of Invention in Britain and Ireland, 1760-1922.